


Pen Pals

by Fedora



Category: Alice Isn't Dead (Podcast), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Making Friends, they both just really need a friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 20:25:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10647420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fedora/pseuds/Fedora
Summary: Jonathan finds an old CB radio in Artifact Storage, for some reason it connects him to a long haul trucker in America.





	Pen Pals

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before the new season of Alice Isn't Dead started, so it doesn't quite fit. But I thought that they both just really needed a friend about now.

Jonathan was searching for more cassette tapes in the no man’s land where the edges of Artifact Storage bled into normal storage when he heard a woman’s voice. She wasn’t loud, but it was after hours and if there had been any researchers still working he would have asked them to let him into the Media Center and not had to search for more tapes. He thought she might be American.

It wasn’t safe to be in Artifact Storage alone was his first thought; that the voice may not belong to a human researcher was his second. He never thought about how he shouldn’t really head toward the voice. That he shouldn’t depress the play and record buttons and head toward the voice, recording her monologue about a large dirty river or the problem of connecting with the mundane world when you knew there was more out there and the tap of his cane on the floor.

Having done that, he shouldn’t have been surprised that he didn’t find a living human or a human shaped thing. He found an old CB radio with its antenna up and various lights glowing. It wasn’t plugged in.

“I just sometimes wish there was someone I could really talk to about this, Alice. I’m still angry, and you’re still out there, but there’s no one here. And sometimes I don’t know how to keep from screaming all I’ve seen, just so I’m not the only one here who knows about it.”

“Hello?” Jonathan’s last tape was still recording.

“Who’s there? What are you? What do you want?” The woman sounded suspicious now, afraid.

“I’m… This is Jonathan Sims of the Magnus Institute, London.” He’d slipped into his official Archivist voice, and remembered something from a movie he’d once seen part of, “over.”

She chuckled at that. “London, wow. How did you manage that? Over.”

Jonathan paused and looked around at the wood shelves overflowing with cardboard boxes as if they held answers and not more puzzles. “I’m not sure. Why? Where are you? Who are you?”

 

Jonathan sounded sincerely confused, so she decided to take a chance. “I’m Keisha, long haul trucker for Bay and Creek Shipping. Right now? I’m stopping for a late lunch in Dubuque, Iowa. Over.”

“I haven’t heard of that…”

“It’s the oldest city west of the Mississippi River,” she interrupted gleefully, Jonathan sounded far to serious. “In the United States.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.”

“Would you believe I work in an institution that studies and researches supernatural and unexplained phenomena and heard you talking over an old CB radio in Artifact Storage?”

“I don’t know. Would you believe in a factory that only seemed to make a coffin for its only employee who aged as fast as the coffin was built, and crawled into it, closing the door behind himself as it was finished?”

“Would you believe a Flesh Hive? A living person playing host to thousands of crawling squirming worms?”

“Would you believe in cannibal… no wait… that implies we’re the same as them. Human eating serial killers with supernatural strength and a weakness to heather oil living in a hidden city in the desert in California?”

“Would you believe in a taxidermy shop inhabited by a creature that uses the skins of other creatures to lure in its prey and can make the animals move?”

“What? No! Ick! No! Gross! No, no taxidermy, with the eyes and the creepy poses and the why would people DO that?”

Jonathan laughed, and she liked that; it had been a long time since she’d made someone laugh. It felt good, a sign that there was more to the world than her investigations. She liked him and his accent that would be snooty, if she didn’t have such an easy time imagining him saying “fuck”.

“So what’s a nice boy like you doing in a creepy place like that?”

 


End file.
